Manning the Store Front – Website Visitor Tracking

A simpleton’s perspective. You know the neighborhood strip mall that you frequent? Besides the big grocery store anchor are there other small stores that you visit regularly? Maybe a Subway Sandwich, a UPS Store, Nail Salon, Tops Yogurt, etc.? These smaller store fronts, for the most part, share a common practice. More often than not when you walk in, there’s a bell, buzzer, or beep that chimes. Depending on how busy the place is there’s someone that says, in a cheerful tone, “Welcome to blah blah…” I love this. Makes me feel welcome and acknowledged. Sound familiar?

Website = Storefront

This may ring truer for small to midsize companies, but Enterprise organizations can benefit from the analogy as well. Your website represents the electronic version of your storefront. Your homepage represents the large (or small) structure that you see in the strip mall. Big signage, calls to action, offers dangling in the window, great graphics, etc. All of this serves to invite the client through the doors, to the counter, into aisles, and through the purchasing process. Agree? How does your storefront look?

Don’t be Creepy

Cheesy, there has to be someone at the counter or in the foyer hollering out that gleeful greeting that makes us feel welcome. Now in this day/age with all the technological Do-Hickies and Thing-a-Majigs that are profiling our every view, action, reaction, I do not recommend being creepy-scary by picking up the phone and calling on a known website visitor and saying, “I see your on our website and that you’re visiting our events page. Are there particular events that you have questions about?” Yikes (hangs up phone) click! Given the size of your organization and all the website track you’re receiving, obviously, this isn’t possible. What I do suggest is that there has to be some sort of acknowledgment of the visit. Do you have the technology in place to accomplish this?

The Happy Guy at the Counter

Organizations that are correctly leveraging the website visitor tracking feature of their platform have the ability to:

Track visits to pages

Segment people based on pages visited

Offer up a specific/compelling email based on visits to webpages

I won’t waste your valuable time convincing you as to the importance of tracking visitors to your site and/or acknowledging their presence and/or following up with these visitors. It’s no surprise that Amazon sends me some sort of email message hours after my visit saying something to the tune of a special offer, comparing other products versus the ones I was exploring, and the famous, “You were looking at the Calphalon Tri-Ply Stainless Steel 13-Piece Cookware Set. People that explored the Calphalon Tri-Ply Stainless Steel 13-Piece Cookware Set also explored these…” Often times I find myself clicking/viewing/further exploring. They got me!

Brass Tacks

Acknowledging visitors to your website keeps you front of mind and can possibly compel return visits. In the vid snippet below I show off what this tactic looks like inside of a marketing automation platform.

Enjoy!

Thanks for reading, thanks for watching… more importantly thanks for commenting and sharing!

This blog post first appeared on the LinkedIn Pulse and is authored by Brandon Contreras, Manager of Global Channel Development at Act-On Software, Inc.